Aspects of the present invention relate generally to the field of video processing, and more specifically to analyzing coded video data.
In conventional video coding systems, an encoder may code a source video sequence into a coded representation that has a smaller bit rate than does the source video and thereby achieve data compression. A video encoder may select from a variety of coding modes to code video data, and each different coding mode may yield a different level of compression, depending upon the content of the source video, the coding mode selected, and the capabilities of the encoder. Then a video decoder may invert the operations performed by the encoder to generate recovered video data. The encoding and decoding process often introduces errors in the video that may be visible as artifacts or other noticeable differences.
Often, video is encoded into a plurality of different versions. For example, the video may be encoded with a high resolution and a low resolution, may be encoded with or without subtitles or with subtitles in different languages, or may be encoded for compatibility with different decoding devices. Then each version must separately undergo a quality check. Conventionally, the quality check for each version of coded video is executed via a manual review of each version to identify noticeable quality errors in the encoding. Such manual review may include physically viewing the playback of the video. This may be an extremely time consuming and error prone process. Furthermore, conventional methods of error detection do not adequately detect temporal artifacts.
Accordingly, there is a need in the art to efficiently identify noticeable errors in coded video and effectively analyze the coded video sequence.